This article is a translation of the German IOTA Beginner’s Guide by .
JINN Microcontrollers
On Feb 3 2020, it was announced that David Sønstebø is withdrawing from this project and ceding all shares in JINN Labs in favor of Sergey lvancheglo “Come-from-Beyond”. I leave the article in the guide because the ternary approach to IOTA remains, however it was decided to focus on binary first for support of current hardware and ternary later for future hardware.
CfB is no longer a member of the IF, but would like to continue the project alone according to his own statements. But at this point, no one can say if and how it will continue. According to David’s statement on Feb 4 2020, the JINN project is dead.
Info about the history
As already described in the “Founding History“, the hardware startup JINN-Labs was founded back in 2014 by David Sønstebø and Sergey lvancheglo “Come-from-Beyond” (both are also founding members of IF). JINN-Labs is an independent company. The nature of its business relationship with IOTA are not yet disclosed, but according to statements by David Sønstebø, JINN Labs is a major funder of the IOTA Foundation.
Qubic is the software protocol (first ideas in 2012) that will be implemented with the help of JINN’s development. To realize this goal, among others, the IOTA Foundation was established in 2015.
Everything about JINN Labs is top secret and current details about the JINN processor are unfortunately not known or come to light only very scarce (see updates below). Almost all available information is from the early days when no non-disclosure agreement was signed.
What is JINN?
JINN is the working title for a new type of microcontroller (general purpose processor). Due to the high mobility for devices in the IoT (for example sensors) the particular challenge is to get by with as little power as possible. JINN is a space-saving yet energy-efficient general-purpose processor chip that works with the ternary system rather than the binary system, with the purpose of performing thousands of transactions per second.
How powerful will a JINN processor be?
JINN should not be compared with today’s binary processors. These are based on vertical scaling, which means that these processors become more powerful only by growing (more transistors). JINN on the other hand uses asynchronous circuits, ternary logic gates and allows horizontal scaling. The increase in computing power is achieved by a network of JINN processors. The performance of a single JINN processor is not that important because as the number of processors in the JINN network increases, the processing power of a single JINN also increases. As soon as the user releases his own single JINN, the processing power of his own JINN can be used for the whole network of JINNs (distributed computing).
What is special about JINN?
Every computer that wants to send a transaction into the IOTA Tangle currently has to do some work as spam protection and solve a small computational problem. This is called “Proof of Work”. A current PC takes about 20-30 seconds to do this calculation. With distributed computing using JINN and outsourced computations using Qubic, PoW can be done on low-resource micro devices. The JINN microcontroller can additionally be built into everyday devices. So any cell phone, refrigerator, sensor, drill, or any other device can send transactions through the Tangle, as it can now perform the required proof of work without its own large computing power.
The JINN processor is optimized in hardware for the Qupla / Abra (Qubic) ternary software. Future IOTA-based IoT devices could communicate with each other via JINN and Qubic, exchanging data or IOTA tokens for real-time value transfer. The big goal is that the JINN ternary microcontroller (or concept) will one day be integrated into the majority of Internet of Things devices.
This may give rise to an entire new sector of the economy that is highly automated and optimized. Ultimately, this is the vision of IOTA – the machine economy.
More Details
Sources
https://iota.stackexchange.com/questions/1703/why-is-jinn-ternary
Original source
https://iota-einsteiger-guide.de/jinn-mikrocontroller.html
Last Updated on 16. February 2021